Business Process Catalog: Why and How

Planning a digital transformation can be quite daunting. Sometimes, just the planning takes several months. Imagine how long it would take to actually execute a major digital transformation program. I have seen this whole process take five years or more.

However, planning of a digital transformation can be optimized. In this post, we will look at one of the simplest but the most effective tools —a business process catalog.

A business process catalog is an inventory of all essential business processes in a company.

Such an inventory must be the foundation of the impact assessment: how will digital transformation impact different functional parts of the organization?

Why? One of the frequent roadblocks of digital transformations is failing to assess some of the business functions and processes. The planning committee, taken up with the grand transformational plans, may not realize how some key but not always visible processes will be impacted by the proposed changes. This failure can be quite expensive, especially when the changes involve replacing legacy systems with new software.

There may be negative impacts on the processes that were forgotten, process breakdown, missing data, loss of reports and analytics, the need for manual workarounds, and even security and privacy breaches.

Discovering functional gaps too late into the project, when statements of work have been approved and the implementation is in progress, is a recipe for major problems, delays, and cost overruns.

One of the best things you can do for your digital transformation is to start by capturing the current business state and business model—this is work typically done by enterprise architects or business architects but could also be done by a senior business analyst. This exercise typically involves capturing a business capability map (BCM) of an organization, including an assessment of the strengths of each capability and highlighting those that are either weak or nonexistent and therefore should benefit from the transformation.

Other business architecture artifacts useful in transformation planning include the enterprise context diagram, a business model canvas, a cross-application business use case diagram, and a business footprint diagram (read more here).

How does a BCM lead you to a process inventory? Each capability in a BCM can be looked at as a process group, serving as a starting point for a process catalog.

You can look at this as a hierarchy:

Level 1 capabilities
Level 2 capabilities within (process groups)
Individual business processes at Level 3
Steps/activities within a business process at Level 4:

Let’s take a closer look at a business process catalog and its structure (download my free process inventory template here).

At a minimum, the inventory should include the following sections: Process, People, Data, and Systems.

Process description and attributes

Capability and process group (where does the process belong)
Process name
Process ID
Process description
Links to process/training documentation
Important flags (internal controls and operational flags)

People involved:

Business owner
Responsible department(s)
External stakeholders (customers, vendors, or regulators)

Data

Master data
Transactional data
Process metrics

Systems that support the process

Business applications
3^rd party tools
Productivity and office tools such as Excel, Outlook, or SharePoint

How do you arrive at the list of processes?

Start with a capability/process hierarchy, or refer to the enterprise business capability map (BCM) if it existsю

As a discovery exercise, view existing internal documentation such as standard operating procedures, new employee training and job manuals, and refer to middle and senior managers’ job descriptions to extract the main processes they are responsible for.

Meet with different business departments and ask them about their main activities, whether triggered by events such as a customer complaint or regular (cyclical) activities such as quarterly internal audits.

When working on the inventory using the template, follow these best practices:

Use consistent naming conventions such as ‘Active verb + object”
Use the same process ID and process name when capturing process flows
Use drop-downs and the data validation feature to limit entries to permissible values and support filtering
Include links to the process maps (diagrams) and ensure that the same hierarchy is used for process map management. Often, organizations use the same hierarchy as the taxonomy for knowledge management.
Add columns as needed, e.g. for multiple flags, metrics, systems, or process outputs.

Finally, always adjust templates to reflect the organization’s methodology, ways of working, and specific project setup.

For more practical and lean templates, get my Business Analysis Playbook and check out these courses and the BA Mindset Video Library.